Eat This Cheese: Lille' Coulommiers

This little ball of cheesy joy is such a simple pleasure that it's difficult to describe. I taste many complex cheeses that hide their true intentions behind enigmatic personalities, so much so that I sometimes find myself prodding more easygoing varieties for a little bit of attitude. Where's the spark? Where's the drama? How can there be no ulterior motive?

Lille' Coulommiers is special in its forthrightness. It doesn't conjure a show of smoke and mirrors, nor does it tempt you with one flavor just to bait and switch with another. To be sure, I'm a big fan of all these qualities in a cheese; some of my favorite dairies produce mysterious cheeses with flavor profiles that you have to work at discerning. Vermont Farmstead has, however, produced a lovely little exercise in stepping back and being true to yourself (from the cheese's point of view, anyways).

Mushroomy and buttery, with a touch of vegetal funk towards the end, Lille's texture is pure velvet on your tongue. There's a luxurious layer of cow's milk fat here, but it's not overpowering like some of the other creamy cheeses I've written about here. Lille is thicker than a brie and won't run down your knife; instead it stays right where you put it, like an obedient child, and waits patiently for your next move.

While Vermont Farmstead's cheese makers claim French influence while creating Lille', my impression is that it's somewhat American in its flavor, pushing more for a straightforward experience to the taster. It's been a long time since I've had a cheese that I could just sit and eat on a plain cracker, without teasing out layers of nuance. Instead, I'm left with a pleasant creamy experience, a little barnyardy but not overly so, and a clean finish that leaves me wanting another bite to refresh the flavor on my palate.

I don't know the last time I could just sit down and eat through a solid wedge of cheese, with nothing but a bowl of crackers and a little sea salt. Many cheeses are just too much for this endeavor. Lille', on the other hand, is a delightful silky treat, one that both cheese newbies and more advanced lovers of the cream will enjoy.

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After leaving the tech world nearly a decade ago, Stephanie made a career jump to her lifetime love, writing. She currently writes for the Huffington Post, KQED's Bay Area Bites, NPR, and other select media outlets. Her first cookbook, Melt: The Art of Macaroni and Cheese, is due out in fall 2013 on Little, Brown with coauthor Garrett McCord.
Being a recovering techy leaves an indelible mark, and everything Stephanie does is infused with her deep fascination with digital technology. She has been blogging since 1999, before blog engines even existed and a great readership consisted of a handful of friends who occasionally thought to check out your site. In 2005 she started her first food blog, which she repurposed in 2007 to become The Culinary Life.
Stephanie can be called many things: food writer, essayist, professional recipe developer, cookbook author, social media consultant, videographer, documentary maker, website developer, archivist of life. Despite all of these titles, she most commonly responds to Steph.

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